kin

2018

kin is an artist book published by Silent Face Projects that explores the human perspective, what it would mean to be able to move outside of this perspective, and the paradoxes that are contained in this proposed point of view and gesture. The title opens with the final paragraph from Darwin’s On the Origin of Species along with a reworking of the same text by the artist that takes on a less humanist angle: an angle that that embraces co-emergence and making kin with our surroundings (in the words of Donna Haraway) rather than the “war of nature” and the hierarchical view of our world that is so easily adopted. However, through authoring this “update,” the text falls short, as it is ultimately crafted looking through the human lens, in effect revealing the impossibility of this proposed angle. In the end the book and images look to explore the melancholy failure of these inquiries while still addressing the importance and value of these ideas for proposing alternative forms of thinking within the social, ecological, and political spheres.